


Sweater Weather

by seaweedredandbrown



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexual Relationship, Fluff, M/M, POV Newton Geiszler, Sweaters, Wordcount: 5.000-10.000, queer platonic relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-28 00:37:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8423905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seaweedredandbrown/pseuds/seaweedredandbrown
Summary: Every year, when winter finally reaches the Hong Kong Shatterdome, Dr Gottlieb takes one (1) day of vacation. And every year, on that day, Dr Geizler's favorite Sweater disappears for roughly twenty-four hours. It doesn't take six PhDs to realize that those two events might be correlated.





	1. Chapter 1

His mother sent him the Thing during Newt’s first year in Hong Kong, meaning well but completely oblivious to the reality of the local weather. Winters in the bay did not require much in terms of warm clothing and since Newt had not returned her calls in months, he deemed this attempt at renewing contact highly optimistic. 

The Thing came in a well-wrapped package, branded from some Parisian high-couture shop, with a little note that read ‘Don’t go and catch a cold, my little Doctor!’. Newt threw the note in the thrash right away and considered donating the Thing without even trying it on. Even before unwrapping it, he already knew it just wouldn’t fit his thoughtfully curated style. She did have her own artistic sensibilities, but definitely did not share his aesthetic.

Newt, who was all about that aesthetic, was also easily distracted. Thus the package waited for a few weeks in the mess of his Shatterdome quarters, and soon it was buried under pizza-boxes-turned-homemade-projectors, candy wrappings, and the odd almost-clean sock. It did not reappear until one fateful day, the very morning after Newt might or might not have gambled his leather jacket during the weekly poker night at Tendo’s.

Surprise: he totally had. And although he knew that he would win it back the next game, he was forced to admit that it was getting just a little chilly to walk around without a second layer.  
He excavated through Kaiju toys and empty pens. For a moment, he feared he had lost it for good, but the Thing was still there, quietly waiting for him to unwrap it and admire all the motherly love that had gone into its purchase. 

Newt found a thing or two to say about motherly love the moment he unfolded it.

First, it was red. It was not even some sort of flashy, punk red Newt could have worked with within the frame of his current aesthetic. No, it was a darker shade, something crimson and classy. To be honest, the _whole design_ of the Thing was horrendous. It had a wheat pattern and whatnot, like it was trying really hard to look casual but took all its inspiration from Nouvelle Vague movies.  
Second, it was big. Screw that, it was _huge_. Newt had not seen his mother in years, but she should still have remembered that he was, uh, chubby. Not… morbidly obese by American standards.  
Third, it had a hood. The hood could have been a good idea. It could have been useful, had Newt suddenly decided to cosplay a particularly cosy Ring Wraith or one of those monks from The Holy Grail, but it was not even black and Newt’s con-going days were well behind him.  
Fourth, it sported a large, deep stomach pocket. Newt was not a kangaroo. He had also worn skinny jeans for long enough to have lost the habit of using pockets. Spreading his stuff everywhere was much funnier.

There was no way in hell he could wear this.

But he _was_ cold.  
Ugh.

He caved in and put it on. The Thing ran all the way down to his knees, and he had to roll the sleeves so many times that they looked like flotation cuffs.  
Nah, that just was not doing it. He was about to take it off and go plead Tendo to give him his jacket back when his eyes flicked towards the mirror on his closet door… and decades of intense anime watching came back to hit him full force.

He unrolled the sleeves, slipped the hood over his head and raised one hand, fingers barely floating over the woolly sea of red.  
“… Moe,” he tried. A tilt of the head, folding his fingers in a mock cat paw, and… “Kawai.”  
Oh yes.  
Oh that could actually work very well.  


“Newt-kun wa… Newt-kun wa totemo kawai desu!”

A grin bloomed over his face.  
He was never getting rid of this, ever.  
This was the best Thing he’d ever worn.

He might even thank his mother.  
But first, he was going to take a selfie.

Or ten.

_ _ _

Newt wore the Thing - which had now been upgraded to the Sweater - for the entirety of that first winter.  
He was wearing it when Hermann came back from his annual day off with a Look of Disapproval and a Scathing Remark, a devastating combo that resulted in, one, a witty and well-timed come-back from Newt, two, an escalation of verbal violence, and three, yet another formal complaint to the PPDC - all in that order.

He kept on wearing it.  
Every single day.

He wore it even when the long sleeves proved absolutely counterproductive in the manipulation of samples.  
He wore it even when the hood started catching chalk dust or when Mako kindly tried to tell him that maybe dark red was not exactly his color.  
He was still wearing it when Hermann resigned himself to simply rolling his eyes and clucking his tongue every morning instead of trying to get him to change into something more… professional.

He wore it all the goddamn time, never washing it either, because it was wool and he was a rockstar.  
He wore it until winter turned into spring and Tendo lost both his favourite bow-tie and Newt’s jacket after a devastating double-bluff from everyone’s favourite xenobiologist.  
(One would think that after so many games Tendo was bound to know that Newt couldn’t bluff to save his life. One would be very wrong indeed.)

The Sweater spent the following spring, summer and autumn curled into a ball at the bottom of Newt’s closet, promising many a cute selfie to come and a very, very kawai winter.  
As months passed, it disappeared under numerous strata of shirts, ties, and godzilla underwear, all cheerfully thrown in heaps and piles with the quiet certainty that comes with one’s inner sense of one’s organised chaos  
Well, one’s inner sense of one’s organised chaos was not enough when winter came the next year. Newt tried not to panic too much. He emptied the closet and the drawers, tossing everything onto the bed, then back into the wardrobe one by one - but the Sweater was still nowhere to be found.

He looked under the bed.  
He checked behind the desk.  
He cleaned his room, even.

That morning, Newt threw away food that wasn’t even completely rotten - he could still get a bite or two out of this, damnit - papers that were important three years ago, half his collection of beer bottles, papers that were still important to this day, a whole box of… stuff… and papers he was supposed to keep until the end of his work at the PPDC.  
But at no point did he find the Sweater.

Crestfallen, he made his way to the lab, late and sans red woolly madness. At least Hermann wasn’t around to drag him down. He would always take one day off when the weather got chilly; that was the only time, save for medical emergencies, that Newt knew him to take vacation. He thought that was crazy; the man was not a robot, no matter how much he acted like one.  
He needed some rest, once in a while, although it wasn’t Newt’s job to tell him that. No, Newt’s job was to be awesome, which today proved more difficult than usual. Shit, he had no idea where his Sweater was. How could he have lost it when he liked it so fucking much? That was fucking stupid and a perfect trigger for a good ol’ case of the depression, which he tried to keep at bay by blasting 80s heavy metal rock as loudly as he could.  
This was always nice.  


And it had nothing to do with trying to drown the silence in the lab.

The Sweater reappeared that very evening, lost within the clothes Newt was sure he had checked through that same morning. Too happy to get it back, he didn’t look into the matter any further and happily wore his Sweater all season, gleefully ignoring Hermann’s frown and cheerfully revelling in everyone else’s more or less friendly comments.  
(The point wasn’t for people to like it; the point was for people to notice it. If they couldn’t understand that Newt Geiszler, six PhDs and thrice as many tattoos, lived in another world where different rules applied, that was their loss, not his.)

The wheel of seasons kept on turning, Kaiju kept on attacking, Hermann kept on disapproving… and, come winter, the Sweater disappeared again.  
Newt got to wear it for two whole days, only not to find it on the third one. He looked everywhere - had he left it in the bathroom? The lab? The mess? Anywhere? - and even texted Herms about it.  
(He had to admit that his lab partner was slightly better than him at some things, one of which was keeping track of stuff.)

Said Dr Gottlieb, Grand Master At Keeping Track Of Things And Other Boring Domains, answered that he was not to be disturbed on his rest day, thank you, and could Newton please stop expecting him to fill his mind with such useless details when he had the end of the world to prevent?

Yeah. Classic Hermann.  
Because Newt wasn’t working super hard at saving the world himself, and Herms’ predictions were _always_ right.  
Something something programmed the Jaegers something.  
Ugh.

That still didn’t tell him where his Sweater was.

Hermann came back to work the next morning looking a little less cranky than usual, and Newt’s Sweater came back to him after Mako found it in the J-Tech kitchen around three in the morning. (She didn’t come to him in the middle of the night. She was polite and well-behaved, so she dropped it by the lab in the morning. She was also very fond of her night-time snacks.)  
Since Newt vaguely remembered having a drink or four there, he filed that thing under ‘weird but awesome but still weird stuff that only happened to him’ and carried on.

Except that it happened the year after that.  
And the next one as well.

Each time, the Sweater had gone missing on the morning of Hermann’s day off - and no one knew what he did on those days, by the way, and wasn’t that super weird, like, was he attending a furry con or something?  
Each time, Newt had turned the whole Shatterdome upside down in his desperate quest.  
And each time, he had found it again - but several hours after giving up on it, like in the evening or on the morning after.

This was weird.  
This was all very weird.

Yes, he could have potentially taken it off during strip poker at the Choi’s and left it behind their couch, but at the same time…  
But at the same time he _did_ remember putting it back on before stumbling back to his quarters and sending it flying across the room after crashing into bed.

It did not take six PhDs and years of inhaling Kaiju blue to start thinking that maybe, just maybe, those two events were correlated.  
Hermann’s one and only day off.  
The Sweater’s disappearances.  
Always happening at the same time.  
Four years in a row.

 _No_.  
Newt could not see what link there could be. He just knew there had to be one. Because he was a scientist, with a mind trained to look for patterns and congruence and things, and that was the only pattern he was seeing - or so he tried to explain to Tendo over bagels and coffee, one late autumn evening in an isolated corner of the mess.

“That, brother,” Tendo said carefully, “is officially the craziest thing you’ve ever said, and you once tried to convince me that the category system is, in your own words, ‘a big sack of Kaiju shit’.”  
“And that’s exactly what it is,” Newt answered between mouthfuls, “but you gotta admit that it’s weird, right?”  
“What, the fact that you can’t find your things in that mess you call home or the fact that Gottlieb is actually a human being who sometimes requests vacation time?”  
“No! The fact that whenever he’s away, I can’t find my fucking Sweater!”  
“I can hear the capital S,” Tendo deadpanned, “I’m starting to be scared.”  
“And I’m starting to think I’m gonna need your help.”  
“What with?”  
“… You do have access to the security cameras, right?”  
“No. Newt, no. Just no. Nope. No can do, no can do at all. I am not breaking that many rules just for you to-”  
“Please! Dude, come on, please. I don’t need much. Just all footage from Hermann’s day off in the last four years.”  
“Not much,” Tendo repeated, “just all footage from the past four years.”  
“Only one day though.”  
“No.”  
“Come on! I need to know. What he does. If he goes out. Or things. Just- just to rule him out, you know?”  
“Newt, Gottlieb’s got nothing to do with your precious Sweater.”  
“Of course not, but you know how my brain works. Dude, please, it’s driving me mad, and you know how the safety of the world depends on my mental health, right?”  
“Actually, I know for certain that the safety of the world depends on whether I can keep my job.”  
“Dude, Stacker won’t fire you for this. I promise. I’ll tell him I’ve forced you, take the blame and all that shit, I mean, he can’t fire me, that’d be like firing Hermann, that’s just never gonna happen, we’re at war and all that crap. You’ll be fine. Just… get me that footage, alright?”


	2. Chapter 2

Two days later, Tendo handed Newt a brown paper envelope. Inside were hours and hours of grainy, black-and-white video from the Shatterdome security feeds, stocked on a non-descript hard drive.  
Tendo only left it in his care after Newt expressly promised that nobody could ever hear about this, ever, not even during a drinking game. He went as far as to make clear that truth or dare was not to be an exception, especially if the question was ‘what’s the craziest way in which a friend has ever enabled your growing paranoia’.

Newt thought Tendo was over-reacting, as he always was, and set out to watch the first file.  
He gave up two minutes and thirty-seconds in. Even at four or six times the speed, this was the most boring thing he had ever done, and he had once watched paint dry. (He had won that bet, too.)  
No, he had much better use of his time. He proved it by spending the following four hours coding a facial recognition programme and another eighty minutes compiling and debugging it.

He let the thing work overnight, trying to resist the temptation of checking whether it was done every half an hour or so (and failing spectacularly). He jumped out of bed as soon as he opened his eyes the following morning, eagerly checking the results - only to be severely disappointed.  
Hermann was indeed seen going in and out of his room several times, but he was always carrying bags or his parka or whatnot, and the feeds never had the full route, so that Newt could not be sure that Hermann was not the one borrowing - screw that: that Hermann was not the one _stealing_ his beloved Sweater.  
There was only one way to be sure, then.  
He’d have to catch him in the act.

An all-nighter and an unreasonable amount of energy drinks later, Newt was going full-on manic. The world had colors he had never noticed before and the Shadow People were beating his ass at tic-tac-toe, but he was still in possession of his Sweater. Hermann’s day off had come and gone and no woolly garment had mysteriously vanished. The fact that Newt had taken to wear it non-stop for the past thirty-hours probably had helped, but that did not matter. He still had the Sweater. No unexplained disappearance this week - take that, mysterious sweater-borrowing person! Nothing could beat him! He was on top of the world, he was the best, he was a rockstar; he was going to get _so much done_ today.

His body gave in some time later.  
He threw the Sweater onto his desk chair and crashed onto his bed, falling straight into a deep, peaceful slumber.  


It was still there when he woke up, although he could have sworn that the sleeves were not in that exact angle last time he had saw them. But then, he had always been paranoid… and if the security footage from that very night had been mysteriously corrupted, well, sometimes these things just didn’t work, right?

Right?

Fuck it, it was not right at all, and now he had to wait yet another year to crack that mystery.

_ _ _

Months passed and the Powers That Were decided that a Wall was the best way to deal with the Kaiju, after all. Newt scoffed and kept on working, even when his salary dwindled, his fundings got cut and he found himself to be the whole biotechnical half of K-Science.  
Yet through all those days and nights of hard toil, caffeine, and heavy metal, Newt never forgot about the Sweater. He just could not let it go, no matter how many times Tendo suggested he did so. It was always there, at the back of his mind, lurking below the dark waters of his thoughts like a fluffy, crimson Kaiju of comfort and cosiness.

It was there when the other Shatterdomes closed and the end of the world went from cheap movie trope to bleak, bleak reality.  
It was there when Newt stopped himself short of reminding Hermann that he spoke German as well and that there was thus no point in switching to Deutsch when arguing with his Vater, although he could only commend him on his choice of last words to good old Lars.  
It was there when their arguments grew incessant and relentless as the attacks increased in both damage and frequency.

It was still there when the Marshall ordered Hermann to take the day off after their third all-nighter in a row.  
Newt would have loved to have a day off, too.  
Newt was deprived of days off after calling the Marshall ‘my man’ twice in the same sentence and giving him a friendly pat on the shoulder.

Newt did not care, because he was now the entirety of the Research division, thus being his own boss (which was always the case anyway, but that least now it was _official_ ).  
And his own boss had suddenly decided that he urgently needed to go and ask his esteemed colleague about something of utmost importance.  
Namely, where the fuck was his Sweater.  
Which had been on a coat hanger, of all things, when he had left in the morning.  
Which had also disappeared from said coat hanger when he had checked around noon.  
Yes, he had checked.  
Of course he had checked.

He was starting to get real tired of his favourite thing acting like a prop in a street magician’s show or something. It had been five long years, he thought as he stomped his way to one esteemed Dr Gottlieb’s quarters. This had lasted long enough.  
He stood in front of the door for one split second, enough time to brace himself for whatever was to come. He would shed the light of truth and justice on this whole story, most probably by way of being yelled at by Hermann, not finding his Sweater in his room, and admitting that he must have had some weirdly-timed blanks.

Newt took a deep breath and turned the handle without bothering to knock.  
“Herms…” he started, then what his eyes saw reached his brain and he could only stare in silence.

The esteemed Dr Gottlieb was sitting on his bed in the corner of the room. He had his back against the wall, an elbow bent on his good knee, the hand lazily propping his face upright. The other rested on his bad leg, holding a cup of tea in the fragile embrace of half-parted fingers.  
A book lay on the duvet near him, abandoned wide open in the middle.  
His computer was still running, projecting the soft sound of waves perpetually crashing against the shore, bathing the room in the orange glow of a seaside sunset.  
He was sound asleep.

But more than the relaxed features of his lab partner, more than the thinness of his lips, slightly parted in slumber; more than the messy hair strands that escaped from his usually well-kept undercut and more than the peaceful breathing that raised and lowered his chest; what Newt thought was amazing, what Newt thought was really the most amazing thing ever was that _Hermann was wearing his fucking Sweater_.

Hermann was wearing his Sweater.  
His big, fluffy Sweater.  
Hermann was wearing his _favourite_ Sweater, his, not someone else’s, no, this monstrosity of a garment was Newt’s and not anyone else’s, with those sleeves that were too long, even for Hermann, and the hood that hid half of his face even better than it hid Newt’s.

Hermann.  
Was wearing.  
His Sweater.

Right.

Hermann was wearing his Sweater.  
It ran down to his thighs and seemed to swamp him completely, pale skin drown in a sea of red wool. It ebbed and flowed around his frail limbs, casually passed over one of his infamous tweed trousers.

Hermann was wearing his Sweater and Newt could have, potentially, said that he was not too sure how he felt about this.  
Except that he was, actually, very sure how he felt about this.  
It was just the right balance of outrage - how _dared_ Gottlieb look so good in _his_ Sweater? - and admiration. How, in the nine circles of hell, had he managed to borrow Newt’s very favourite thing, every year, for five years in a row, and how come Newt was only seeing it _now_?

To think that - to think that he had been right.  
He had expected everything except being right, and yet there he was.  
He had been right all along: the Sweater’s yearly disappearance and Hermann’s days off were linked by the dumbfounding causality of the latter stealing the former.  


He had been right and he could not wait to tell Tendo.

Such a crime could not go unpunished.  
Such a feat would not go unnoticed either.  
And Hermann did look quite relaxed, and the gods knew he needed his rest, and…  
… Fuck it, he could not tell Tendo at all.  
He had a much better idea instead.

Newt stepped back and closed the door as softly as he could.  
Hermann might have had the upper hand for all those years… But now Newt was onto him - and he knew exactly what he was going to do about all this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here comes your Sunday fluff, once again beta-read by the awesome [@johnnyfuckingappleseed](http://johnnyfuckingappleseed.tumblr.com/) and [@tanouska](http://tanouska.tumblr.com/) \- all remaining mistakes are my own. :)
> 
> I hope you've enjoyed this update! Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments and stay tuned for the 3rd and last chapter next week. :)  
> (Poor Hermann, he's *never* going to see that one coming...)


	3. Chapter 3

“What to do about all this” ended up taking Newt much longer than expected. He had imagined that with enough dedication, he could have been done by the end of that week, but Amazon wouldn’t deliver to Hong Kong anymore, Alibaba did not have the exact thing he wanted and he didn’t trust any other online resellers.  
He fussed and fretted and frenzied. The apocalypse was getting ever closer, coming their way faster than a Jaeger pilot on free desserts day.  
If he was going to do this, he had to do it now.

It cost him a lot, but for the sake of - whatever, for the sake of _whatever_ \- he bit the bullet and resigned himself to call his mother.

It was five in the morning in whichever country she was in, some paradisaic place where typhoons never struck and cocktails were always the perfect blend of sweet and ice cold, but she was delighted to hear his voice anyway.  
He tried really hard not to think that it might be the last time he’d ever get to hear hers and cut the conversation short, before telling her he loved her or something.

The package arrived two weeks later. To Newt, it was three or four years too late, but that did not matter; he had a more pressing problem now.  
Now that ‘it’ was here, all was left was to give ‘it’ to Herms.

Ugh.  
It wasn’t that he hadn’t thought about that part.  
It was that he had gone to great lengths _not_ to think about that part.  
He’d rather snatch her pilot suit right out of Sasha’s hands and pilot Cherno Alpha all by himself than have to give ‘it’ to Herms, but then, who could he ask? Tendo? No, thank you, if he was to make it out of this alive he refused to give the man more blackmail material than strictly necessary.

Ugh.

Frying his brain out to the pumping blasts of Ukrainian dubcore had never sounded so good.

But OK.  
OK, he was doing this.  
He was totally doing this.  
This was a thing he could do.  
This was a thing he was about to do.

He had already done the first step, i.e. walking up to Hermann’s door with ‘it’ in hand. It was still wrapped in its super expensive Parisian brand bag thing, but thankfully the corridors were deserted at this hour, not that he had already prepared half a dozen good excuses as to why he could be seen with that sort of stuff in hand in that particular corner of the ‘dome.

He also knew that Herms was in there. It was not because he had totally instinctively learnt his routine through those long years spent working and bickering together, no. Not at all. (But boy, was there ever someone more bent on following his routine than Hermann Gottlieb?)

And Newt had been there for two whole minutes now, bouncing off the balls of his feet, reaching out for the handle, deciding against turning it, scratching his scalp furiously instead, then taking a deep breath and trying again.

Rinse, wash, repeat.

Tendo was going to have a field day with this. Newt could already hear him snickering in front of the security feed. He’d be choking on his bagel or spilling his coffee, then he’d call Alison and that Beckett bastard and then the whole Shatterdome would know and they would make fun of him and it would be like middle school all over again-

“Oh, fuck it,” he yelped before opening the door with all his strength, barging in without a second thought. He stepped up to Hermann, who was sitting at his desk, pencil in hand and surprise on his face, and shoved ‘it’ in his arms. “There! Let’s not make this more awkward than it already is, you know that I know that you know that I know, so stop using my Thing and wear this in-fucking-stead!”  
“I beg your pard-”

Newt was already out of the door.  
Screw that, he was already in his own room, his door locked and his head under his pillow.

OK, OK, he had done it.

His Sweater would not go missing anymore, now that Hermann had ‘it’ instead.  
Newt did not know how he was ever going to look him in the eyes now, but wait, why was he the one being embarrassed, _Local Rockstar Acting Like Lovestruck Teenager Assuredly Not Being Lovestruck_ , Herms was the creepy one here! Yes! Not Newt! Newt had no reason to feel bad. Newt had all the reasons to feel outraged, but no, he was a puddle of shame and awkwardness.  
Well, the puddle of shame and awkwardness was going to keep his head under his Gojira pillow, and-

Someone knocked on his door.

“I’M NOT IN! GO AWAY! COME BACK NEXT CENTURY!”

Ah, maybe yelling from beneath his duvet was not the best idea ever, but it did stop the knocking. Newt waited for the footsteps (and the characteristic tapping of a cane) to fade away before peering out of his pillow fort. Hermann had not materialised in his bedroom to yell at him. Good. He could pretend things were back to normal, at least as normal as they ever were in the last bastion of the more or less sane - saner? - in the last bastion of the *saner* part of humanity.  
He sighed in relief and reminded himself that he was thirty-something and could probably benefit from acting like it once in a while.

His phone buzzed with an incoming message.  
Newt crawled under his duvet.  
He would NOT deal with this. Not today, not ever.

His phone, which was in the stomach pocket of the Sweater and thus had followed him under the covers, buzzed again.  
Newt told it to fuck off.

Offended, the phone refused to answer that.  
Several seconds, almost a minute passed… and then it buzzed a third time.

“Oh, alright,” Newt moaned, “if you fucking insist.” 

The blue glare of the screen was an aggression in itself when his eyes had already gotten used to the dark of his bedroom and his glasses were smudged - when were they even cleaned? Was that a thing that existed? Clean glasses? - but he could read the messages anyway.

They were all from Hermann.  
_Of course_ they were from Hermann.

‘I fail to see the meaning of this. We are in November. My birthday, which you have not once celebrated in the past nine years, is in June.  
Fuck you, Herms; if you couldn’t tell that the lab was always cleaner on June 9th and your cup of tea had brewed itself, Newt did not care about your stupid birthday anyway.

He swiped to the next message.

‘It was not my intention to wrong you in any way. Please do accept my apologies if I have done so.’  
There, that was more like it.

And the next message was…

Holy shit, the next message was a picture.

First things first, Hermann Gottlieb knew what a selfie was.  
Second things second, he knew how to take one, and a fucking good one at that.

The lightning was just right. It fell softly on the shimmering grey-blue sweater Newt had sent his mother scouring all over Paris for. The colour suited him perfectly, bringing out the brown in his eyes and the odd blond highlight in his hair, and the size… The size was just right.  
Newt had worked very hard to find Hermann’s measurements. He was more than happy that it had paid off. It wasn’t like he had had many opportunities to see the man in anything other than those awful sweater vests or that parka; although the parka did fit him, in a weird and totally not endearing way, but that was besides the point.  
The point was that the angora wool flowed over Hermann’s chest like a second skin, that the sleeves were just the right length to bring out that ‘moe’ aesthetic, and that the turtleneck - the turtleneck and the way it went all the way up to his jaw - that the turtleneck was a fucking touch of fucking genius.

Hermann was smiling, on the flickering screen of Newt’s phone, and he might have looked tired and pale, as he always did, but Newt hadn’t seen that little lopsided line in a very, very long time.  
All feeling of shame and embarrassment evaporated from his chest. He brought the phone closer, grinning like an idiot.

‘Thank you’, the caption read, ‘I will take great care of this.’

_ _ _

They obviously never mentioned the Sweater Incident ever again. Newt never saw Herms wearing it either, but then, he had other things in mind.

The Double and Triple Events occurred.  
Operation Pitfall.  
They Drifted.  
That did change quite a lot. It did not change the bickering - nothing could ever change the bickering - but it might have made Newt a little more mindful, a little less chaotic, and Hermann a little more flexible, a little less prone to snapping.  
It also forced them to talk to each other. About their feelings, of all things. Newt would have avoided it if he could have, but then, after what he had seen in Hermann’s head, and what Hermann had seen in his, it was less a matter of ‘ignoring this thing bubbling in his chest every time he looked his way’ and more one of ‘forsaken gods of old, when Newt looked at him, something bubbled in Herms’ chest too’.  
And it was cliché, and it was awkward, but they could not see the proof that this thing, this affection, no matter how nebulous and non-heteronormative it was; they could not see that this thing was here, real and requited, and not talk about it, like the two adults they were supposed to be.

Then, one thing led to another: meetings, debriefings, packing up the lab. Time flew by, through grieving and trying to get back to a sense of normalcy.  
Suddenly, Hermann had accepted a researching and teaching position in some medieval English town and Newt tagged along, because that was what they were, now. People who tagged along after the other on the wild ride of life, or whatever Tendo had told him during that liquor-fuelled orgy of a victory party.

Thus Newt followed Hermann to ivy-upon-thames, with the open intention of making his life as maddening as possible while gloriously crashing on his couch.  
(Newt never slept on that couch. Not even once.  
A three-way Drift with an half-dead alien did leave some sequels. Nightmares were among them. Newt could not fall asleep on his own anymore.)

And living together in rainy, cold Britain meant the grand return of the Sweaters. Newt was both looking forward to see Hermann wear his and to don his own again; which is why he was crestfallen when he couldn’t find it anymore.  
It was not in any of his luggage, boxes, bags, or packages from the storage unit. Had he lost it? How could he lose it? He loved the thing, he just did, how could he ever lose it, this was a catastrophe, this was Not Good, this was an Incident. Things had been good to him since they moved here, even with his mood swings worse than ever, but now this, he did not know how he was supposed to d-

Some red thing poking out of Hermann’s desk.  
There was a dark red, woolly thing poking out of Hermann’s desk.  
It had one drawer that had never closed properly, that desk, because it was a sweet old thing they’d bought in an antique shop, lovely piece of wood, but not what Newt wanted to think about.

Newt was thinking about the tiny bit of crimson fluff that was poking out of it.  
He gulped.  
They had rules, in this house. ‘Do not touch Hermann’s belongings without his explicit permission’ was one of them. Well, if this was what he thought it was, then it was not one of Hermann’s belongings, and neither was the desk, by the way, it was thing they’d bought *together*, and Newt was opening the drawer before he even thought about reaching out for the handle.

Yes, indeed.  
That was his Sweater, neatly folded in an empty drawer.

What the actual hell.

Newt thought they were past this.  
And now he had questions. A lot of them. Most being a little embarrassing to ask, but he thought they were past that too, and Herms had seen That One Time In High School through the Drift and he had not even smirked. So Newt braced himself and joined his lifemate, who was reading on the living room couch.

“So…” he started, mostly to catch his attention, the Sweater in hands. Hermann looked up, putting his book away when he saw what Newt was holding. “So you didn’t like the one I gave you, after all?”  
“No, I appreciate it a lot. I wore it yesterday, as you might have noticed.”  
“Yeah I did, but then, why did you keep this one?”  
“I…” Hermann’s voice trailed off. That didn’t happen often.  
“You… ?”

Hermann blushed, his cheeks soon blotched in little red spots.  
Well, that was a sight for the ages. That happened even less often that the voice trailing off thing.

Then he opened his mouth, drew some air in, closed it and opened it again, this time to say something so… so un-Hermann that Newt thought all those years playing the guitar at full volume where finally biting him back as hard as they could on his auditive capacities.  
“Wait, it what?”  
“Nothing! Forget it.”  
“No, it what?”  
“Never you mind. I said, forget it. I’m reading,” Hermann grunted, burying his face in his book.

Oh, but this would not do.  
This would not do at all.

Newt grinned and slouched closer to Hermann, spreading the red Sweater over them both (and Hermann’s book, in the same movement.)  
“It did not what, Hermann?”  
“Nothing. Leave me alone!”  
“Come on,” Newt pleaded, cupping his jaw and gently turning his gaze towards him, “tell me. Be a sap, just this once. You know you want it.”  
“F-fine,” Hermann said, rolling his eyes. “It’s a very fine sweater, but it did not smell like you.”

Newt squealed and nuzzled his nose in the crook of Hermann’s neck, taking a great delight in the sheer thought that this was now an actual thing he could actually do.  
Hermann scoffed and patted his head, before fishing his book from under the garment and resuming his reading.

Damn, that was comfortable.  
That was the most comfortable thing ever.  
Yet as over-sized as it was, the Sweater was still not big enough to fully cover the both of them.

Newt had no choice.  
He’d have to ask his mother for a plaid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it!  
> A thousand thanks to [@johnnyfuckingappleseed](http://johnnyfuckingappleseed.tumblr.com/) for their thorough and quick beta-reading, and to [@tanouska](http://tanouska.tumblr.com/) for easing my worries, you guys are the best!

**Author's Note:**

> Hello and thank you for reading! Here is a short, 3 chapter-long bit of fluff to ease us in the beginning of the cold season. I intended to make this as fluffy and silly as possible - let me know if I've succeeded in the comments, and please look forward to the next part on next Sunday. :3
> 
> The sentence Newt says in the beginning should read as "Newt is/I am absolutely cute". My Japanese is awful, so feel free to correct me.
> 
> A thousand thanks to [@johnnyfuckingappleseed](http://johnnyfuckingappleseed.tumblr.com/) for their thorough and quick beta-reading, and to [@tanouska](http://tanouska.tumblr.com/) for easing my worries, you guys are the best!  
> 


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